Teaching

Above all, I want students in my classes to leave with new ways of thinking about a particular subject, whether law, race, policy, gender or history. Though information is important, I believe the far more crucial learning process is for students to develop new methods of argument and critical lenses of analysis that they can then bring to bear on any problems or narratives they come across in the future. To this end, my classes focus on collective learning, involving workshop activities and document analysis along with exposure to numerous types of sources in readings, lecture and discussions, from songs, legal opinions, memoirs, film, government documents, art and more. I rely on small group exercises and often center classes on student-directed learning through case studies, reading selections, class facilitations, team presentations, ongoing assessment and other tools. My research focuses on education precisely because of my strong belief in quality education as a potentially transformative experience that should be accessible to all. I strive to bring that commitment into every classroom.

Recent Courses Taught

BIS 321 United States History from 1865
BIS 323 United States History to 1865
BIS 393 Special Topics
BIS 398 Directed Study/Research
BIS 414 Topics in Human Rights
BIS 498 Undergraduate Research
BISLEP 301 Law, Economics and Public Policy
BCUSP 202 Introduction to Law

Research/Scholarship

My research is centered on the interdisciplinary intersections of law, inequality, race and class and the implications of particular historical processes on social justice movements. I have spent the last several years immersed in the ramifications for educational policy of unequal and racialized taxation and funding, and am currently revising my book manuscript, Racial Taxation: School Finance and "Taxpayer Citizenship," 1869-1973. This manuscript argues that the separation of race and class identities by courts and lawyers in education cases was deeply linked to property tax finance structures which both solidified school inequality and entrenched racial segregation while contributing to the emergence of a far-reaching "taxpayer citizen" identity tying tax payments to the right to education. I have also recently started research on my next project, Red Scare Women's Rights: The "Long Cold War" and the Nineteenth Amendment, which focuses on how the role of women in socialist Russia's early days had a propaganda impact on the debates over the political position of women in the U.S. in the same period and traces the diaspora of ideas around women's rights at the beginning of the "long Cold War."